Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
As Iraq deteriorates, some born-again hawks like Christopher Hitchens are still waving their sabers -- but others are skulking toward the rear.
Sep 22, 2003 | Liberals who supported the war with Iraq had the unpleasant experience of aligning with people they despise and against those they respect, or at least respected. Many scorned the Bush administration and its putative motives, objected to the doctrine of preemption on which the war was based, and were dismayed by the way the president alienated America's allies. They recoiled at the hypocritical audacity of people like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who spoke of Saddam's slaughter of the Kurds as a causus belli, even though, as part of the Reagan administration, he supported the Iraqi leader when the genocide was actually taking place.
But they went out on a limb and backed the war anyway, pushing aside their ingrained suspicion of American military might. Unlike much of the Democratic leadership, which supported the war for reasons of domestic politics, these liberals came to their position through conviction. Some decided that, after years of decrying Saddam's sadism, they wanted no part of a movement to prevent his ouster, no matter how cynical the administration doing the ousting. They didn't believe that the administration cared for the Iraqi people or their liberation, but they did believe that liberation would be, if nothing else, a side effect of the campaign.
Others, like Paul Berman, author of "Terror and Liberalism," believed in the idea of a remade Middle East. A few, including David Remnick, editor in chief of the New Yorker, Mitchell Cohen, co-editor of the left-liberal journal Dissent, and several staff members at the New Republic, agreed with former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack's assessment that Iraq's weapons programs posed a threat that had to be dealt with eventually.
Yet now, as the systematic violence of fascism is replaced by the random violence of anarchy, Iraqis are daily telling journalists they were better off before. No weapons have turned up, casting doubt on the notion that Saddam was a real threat to anyone but his own brutalized people. America's recent plea for U.N. help is widely seen as proof that the administration of President George W. Bush, no matter how optimistic in public, believes the occupation is going poorly. Opponents of the war are saying, "I told you so."
Few liberal hawks, though, are making mea culpas, even if some of them seem increasingly uneasy. Most say that even if the postwar situation is a mess -- and not everyone agrees that it is -- the war was worth it. They say that the majority of Iraqis will have better lives because Saddam has been deposed, the regime's long-term threat to the world has been neutralized, and U.N. resolutions flouted by Iraq were enforced, even if America spurned the U.N. to enforce them. Most pro-war liberals find much to criticize in the postwar planning, but they say talk of failure and quagmire is as premature as Bush donning a flight suit to celebrate victory. Some may be having second thoughts, but they're keeping quiet.
"I still stand by the position I took, in fact very much so," says Dissent co-editor Mitchell Cohen, a professor of political science at Baruch College. "The argument that I made was partly made on humanitarian concerns, because I think the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein was indeed one of the most appalling regimes of recent memory. But my argument wasn't entirely made on the basis of that. The argument I made was that given the nature of the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein, this was going to have to be confronted sooner or later. In any event, I do think that however difficult and problematic the situation is now -- and I'm not very happy about a lot of things that have happened and mystified by a few of them -- I still think that in the long term the Iraqi people and indeed the world are safer because Saddam is gone from power."
Christopher Hitchens, an ex-Trotskyite who famously broke with the left during the run-up to war, is even more sanguine about his stance. While the liberal conventional wisdom is that the occupation is a debacle, "I know from my own experience it's not true," he says. Hitchens recently returned from Iraq, where he hung out with L. Paul Bremer, the occupation's chief administrator, and his most recent Vanity Fair column paints a fairly rosy picture of the occupation's progress. "I was quite startled by how well it was going," he says. "I support it whether it goes well or not. I don't demand success in advance of a policy I support. It can take a long time if you want a revolution."
Hitchens admits being somewhat baffled by the American failure to get the electrical grid up and running in Iraq. "I must say it is staggering to me that this country can't mobilize the can-do bit, the know-how bit it's so famous for. That is amazing."
Still, while humanitarian concerns formed part of Hitchens' rationale, he says he doesn't much care if some Iraqis now say their lives are worse than they were under Saddam. "I've never yet been to any country that's undergone a revolution -- and by the way, if this was being called a revolution rather than an occupation, the left would be making excuses for it -- in any country that's undergone a revolution it's very common to find a perverse nostalgia for the old days. You still find it in Spain. The vast majority of Iraqis wanted [Saddam] to be removed even at the cost of foreign intervention, and still do. Most Iraqis and Kurds regard it as a deliverance. But suppose they didn't. The news has to be broken to them one way or another. Unfortunately, the government in their state wasn't one to which one could be indifferent. Iraq is not unfortunately just their internal affair."
Indeed Hitchens, perhaps more than any other commentator outside the febrile precincts of the right, believes in the connection between Saddam's regime and global Islamist terror. Iraq, he says, "was a launching pad for terrorist attacks." He bases that conclusion on Iraq's sponsorship of Palestinian terror and on suspicion that Saddam supported Ansar al-Islam, the Islamist movement that operated in the Kurdish no-fly zone. It's unlikely, he says, that Ansar al-Islam is an organic movement, because it doesn't make sense "that returning Afghan fighters decided to move to Kurdistan and attack the government there as their main jihad." Then he adds, "I myself interviewed [Palestinian terrorist] Abu Nidal [in Iraq] when he was most wanted man in the world."
Of course, while Saddam's support for Palestinian terrorists is well known, his connection to al-Qaida remains speculative, and most war opponents dismiss it outright. Similarly, the military's failure to find WMD -- and postwar revelations about exaggerated intelligence -- have led liberal opinion to solidify around the idea that Iraq was never a threat. Yet even as pro-war conservatives have turned to humanitarian arguments to justify the war retroactively, pro-war liberals continue to emphasize national security concerns.
It's ideologically convenient for war opponents to assume that the American failure to find chemical and biological weapons means Saddam didn't have them. But war supporters who've followed the regime for years say such a dismissal of Iraq's threat is far too glib. They admit to being baffled by the weapons' disappearance, but argue that the sacrifices Saddam made over the years to conceal them testify to their existence. After all, had Saddam complied with weapons inspectors, sanctions would have been lifted and he could have continued ruling Iraq without outside interference. He even could have restarted his weapons program once the world's attention was turned elsewhere.
"I'm as mystified as anyone about the weapons," says Cohen. "I fully expected that two weeks after the war began, all sorts of things were going to be found." Yet that doesn't mean he's changed his assessment of the danger Saddam posed. "I think the issue of weapons is far from over. I think we should be worried not just by the fact that they didn't find any weapons, but by the fact that they found nothing. Something doesn't seem right about this to me. It doesn't seem to me plausible that Saddam was willing to give up $150 billion in oil revenue" -- not to mention his own rule in Iraq - "to hide an arsenal that doesn't exist."
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